You know how you have a feeling all the time, but don’t know if anyone else ever does– an interior feeling, in your own private landscape? And then you read an articulation of it– so sudden and electrifying, that way fiction can reach out its lightening finger and brush you under your chin. There! This story, “Tom in Siena,” by Lee Houck, did that for me– in this passage, the strange– what is the opposite of recognition?–opposite of nostalgia and realization that Tom feels… I have this feeling often, sometimes even in places I’ve been all my life. I think maybe we all do?

One beautiful thing about the story is that Houck gives voice to people that can only be real. “Only” because they also have interior landscapes, inside realizations and fears and nostalgia that I recognize. How can a writer do that, create it all wholecloth? It’s kind of a miracle, when you think about it, to find recognition, memorable and immediate, in fiction.

I keep thinking about this story, including this scene, and Houck’s description of Tom’s out-of-timeness. You should read the entire story for yourself; that’s how good it is. Come on, don’t you need some imagery and unexpected recognition you didn’t know you needed today?

“He remembered his first trip to Europe—eleven years old, a school choir trip.

They sang all over Paris in school auditoriums for small audiences made up of students who were happy to be distracted from their lessons, but surely weren’t interested in ‘Sing a Song’ or ‘For the Beauty of the Earth.’ They clapped, nonetheless, and he felt like a good singer.

He remembered the drastic shrinking of scale—in buildings, in cartons of orange juice, in cars. He remembered the language written on signs and storefronts—handsome words with too many vowels, covered in little chalet hats, and squiggled marks.

Later, when he was in high school, there was another school trip to Paris, and this time he had a few years of French behind him. He was disappointed to learn that what earlier had seemed so magical was nothing more than the banal advertising of every city on the planet: Magazines, Newspapers, Candy, Cigarettes.